An unprecedented torrent of water carried everything before it. Desperate locals: ‘Everything has been destroyed’

The morning after the storm of rain and torrential water that crashed to the end at the foot of Biokovo, the people of Podgorica are adding up the damage. An unprecedented torrent of water on Saturday literally carried everything before it. Flooded basements, ground floors of houses, destroyed furniture, white goods, sunken cars… On Sunday morning, shovels, trucks and excavators are working on the Podgorica waterfront. The residents of the house in Ivan Rendi Street are trying with the help of firefighters and neighbors to clean up the sludge deposits that remained after the water receded.

– My house, my neighbor’s house, is also flooded. Until after midnight we were extracting water from the ground floor. Everything is destroyed, all elements are full of mud. We don’t even have electricity – says Maja Žitko Pavlinović, a native of Podgorje who lives in Zagreb and comes to Podgorje in the summer.

– I was returning from work in Makarska. It was raining. Driving along the waterfront, I saw stones rolling behind me. Everything happened in just a few minutes. Something like this, but much less, happened twenty years ago. I hid the boat in the port and managed to reach the house, the water was up to my knees. I grabbed onto the wall to keep from being swept away by the water. The wall was shaking, and the water was rising more and more. At one point, the water under the concrete slabs lifted everything into the air. The bow of the ship was facing me. I expected the eight-meter-long ship to literally lean on the car. I couldn’t escape anymore, I climbed the stairs out of fear – says doctor Branko Glušec, an aesthetic surgeon, who pulled out furniture from the submerged ground floor of the house the morning after the flood. The interior of his car was also destroyed.

He, like others the locals consider those responsible for the maintenance of catchment waters and the cleaning of canals. Namely, we learn from the locals that this paved street was once “open” and that when it rained, a stream would flow down it from the top of the highway. Podgora is configurationally located right below Biokovo, which is full of underground water and springs on a steep terrain. Due to heavy rainfall, it has happened before that the water in the streams starts from the top of the highway to the waterfront itself. Then those responsible for the maintenance of local roads and watersheds decided twenty years ago to “cover” the street with concrete blocks, under which they left two channels for water that flowed from the top of the highway down the two main streets of Podgorje towards the waterfront. Over time, the canals were filled up and now only one canal is free, which takes the water to the sea.

– Back in June, we called Croatian Water to clean the canals. They haven’t been cleaned up to this day – Podgoran residents say in unison. You can’t fight against nature, but when nature is destroyed, as was the case with this summer’s fire that devastated a large part of the Biokovo Nature Park, nature returns in the worst way.

– When talking about the facts that influence such events, extreme conditions and climate changes are always mentioned, but rarely human influence. I cannot comment on the specific situation in Podgora, but when designing drainage channels, meteorological data should always be taken into account – according to retired climatologist Zvonimir Katušin.

During the Austro-Hungarian era, the sunken street was a raging stream

According to old maps from the Austro-Hungarian era, the flooded street in Podgora someć was a raging stream, which served for the unimpeded flow of precipitation and raging water towards the sea. About twenty years ago, it was paved, leaving two water channels.